OneGuyFromBarlick

Stanley wrote:See Charles Wirz of the Voltaire Institute. Voltaire never said it, it gained credence due to misplaced quotation marks in a publication called 'They Never said it'.

My learned friend, it is why I added Evelyn

It is still a spurious quotation.....

Francis Maude, Cabinet Office minister, on Sky news in the last half hour....
"A bit of extra fuel in a jerry can in a garage is a sensible precaution to take"

A caller to Radio five

"I'm trying to stock up on pasties, just in case, but it's a b****r geting them into my jerrycan. Why can't they make the spouts wider?"

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" from George Orwell's Animal Farm

A rail against Stalin's socialism/communism

Baroness Kinnock quoting Aung Saan Suu Kyi on the Today programme this morning. Asked how far Burma was on the way to democracy on a scale of one to ten Suu Kyi replied "On the way to one".

What a brave and sensible woman! In relative terms the recent elections are a quantum leap forward but only a start towards real freedom. I tend to be suspicious of democracy, Oscar Wilde said that "Democracy is the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people". He could have been near the truth, a much over-used word.

"The most important thing in the engine house is the shaft going out into the mill"
SCG in a programme with Phil Smith broadcast over twenty years ago.

Germaine Greer on TV last night -

"When Gordon Brown smiled birds fell dead from the sky"

Tory MP Nadine Dorries on 23rd April 2012...
"Unfortunately, I think that not only are Cameron and Osborne two posh boys who don't know the price of milk, but they are two arrogant posh boys who show no remorse, no contrition, and no passion to want to understand the lives of others - and that is their real crime."

From her mouth to God's ear.......

A brigadier who was a Royal Marine captain in 45 Commando in the Falklands War saying that it wasn't being brave and courageous that made the best soldiers but being professional.

My old sergeant Ted Lancaster was a good man to listen to on this subject. He went through WW2 with the Cheshires as a machine gunner and occasionally we would get him to tell us old war stories. He was convinced that the above is true and quoted many instances to illustrate it. He only had one comrade who got a significant medal and he told us that this happened because he was drunk, had fallen asleep at his post and woke to find himself surrounded. Instinct took over and the result was that he became a decorated war hero. I once met a man who got the VC with the Gloucesters in Korea and he told me he couldn't remember anything about the episode where he mounted a one man attack on a machine gun nest that was causing them grief. He reckoned he had blacked out and gone berserk.

BBC WeatherGirl (London ), "This must be the wettest drought we have ever had"

Radio 5 Football pundit ref new potential England manager.

"I don't think he will be haggling over the odd £500,000 a year."

Thinking about the delays in bank reorganisation after Mervyn King's speech:
"If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination".
Thomas de Quincey

"The people have spoken! (Then in an undertone as he turned away from the microphone) The Bastards!"

Attributed to a Tammany Hall political boss announcing an adverse set of voting figures.

"This is my last and most sad election defeat"
Ken Livingstone announcing his retirement from active politics.

I don't have an exact quote for this but only (approximately) what a British foreign office diplomat reported. He claimed that when he was in Afghanistan President Karzai said something to him along these lines: "Afghanistan has suffered for never having been fully colonised by the British. If we'd become a British colony, like say India, we would have benefited from well-built roads and railways and a great Civil Service."

"Time for the Euro-zone to make up or break up". (David Cameron yesterday.)
If only it was that easy.....

Candidate on Dragon's Den

" I retired from the ring ten years ago. I was the second best boxer in Britain.- I had a hundred fights, and came second in all of them."

I like it! We have been neglecting quotations lately. My current focus is from a letter I wrote this morning to Steve Murrells, the CEO of Cooperative Food: "In your letter of 13th August you were “pleased to inform me that the item will be in store within the next couple of weeks”. There is still no Condor Green pipe tobacco in stock over four weeks later at your Barnoldswick branch."
Remember what I was saying about incompetence in another topic?

from the BBC website

GMB leader Paul Kenny turned his fire on the shadow chancellor on Sunday, saying: "He would give an aspirin a headache, wouldn't he?"

From tobacco reviews.com whilst investigating the lure of Condor Green


" I was sitting on a bench in the garden the other day, smoking my pipe and studying a rare, abstruse text, when a large magpie fell from the tree branch directly above me, paralyzed from the beak down. You see, I was not smoking any ordinary tobacco - I was smoking the mighty Condor.

I'm having to smoke Bruno at the moment, it only works on bears.....